Home Forums Discussions Problems ERx: what now?

Thanks for the additional input, Leslie.... very helpful.
The situation is no less frustrating, but at least we can direct our frustration more appropriately.

That may be the problem....

Gene

Ours is still down as of 5 minutes ago. We are on the West coast so not sure if that has anything to do with anything. Would be nice if we could get an email or something notifying us of an outage and they are aware of it etc. Not sure how Cyber Monday would be the cause. Sounds like a B.S. response to me.

I am not paying money to Epic. I am paying to AC. Last communication I had from AC was about price increase. I guess you all read it. Part of this increase were fees for E prescribing, that was spotty x several months now. Maybe you Leslie have some nostalgic feelings about AC and warm and fuzzy Dr. Berman. I don't. I was repeatedly lied pretty much in my face by Dr. Berman on the phone about practice management. This new crew talks a talk, but I have not seen any walk yet. If AC could not put a pressure on NewCrop, then they should have said so.
I am a customer, I was sold a product. This product does not work as promised.

For someone who has been so dissatisfied for as long as you have been on the boards I cannot understand why you continue to use the product. Almost universally when people feel they are being cheated, lied to and victimized they do not keep running to the source but rather high tail it in the other direction. Perhaps it is time for you to also take leave in order to regain your natural good nature.

I'm with Robynne, an email notification would be nice.

ePrescribe still not working...not failing, but not going through either...stuck in queue for almost two hours now.

My eprescribing failed at 8 AM, received an email from the hospital IT department at 2:14 PM. After scripts did not go through twice it was pretty obvious there was a problem. Just trying to keep things in perpective.

Ever since you went to Epic you have been such a damn Pollyanna. Who are you?

Any updates?

Ours is still down
Rochester NY

HAHAHA, Jon, I am still traumatized. Can't sleep at night because every thought that comes into my mind is associated with a "click" sound in my brain!

Jon,

I have been working behind the scenes to get Leslie to join us in San Diego, but the name calling is not helping. :P

I'm looking forward to he Epic VS Ac bake-off.

Leslie,

If you wear a foil hat to bed at night you won't get that clicking sound!

Now that .gov has fixed their website, NEWCROP needs to get that crack team to fix our E-Rx. For me it is "worse than down" as many scripts are in "que". 2 frustrating Mondays in a row.

Pay attention ladies and gentlemen. When the government is running healthcare we'll look back on these Newcrop problems as "the good old days".
Dave

Indy,

The bake off will be a flop.....AC wins hands down. Even the Pillsbury Doughboy could not take the hits to the stomach that Epic has given me!

Marty,

The foil hat won't work because Epic needs to know if it is Reynolds Wrap, Meijer's brand or some othe generic wrap and I cannot find a diagnosis to associate with "metal on head".

I think that we are getting off the track and that name-calling and arguing only serve to promote a divide and conquer strategy. Right now, we as the Amazing Charts community need to come together to find a way to have some sort of meaningful dialogue with Amazing Charts' leadership about the electronic prescribing problem. Otherwise, the status quo continues, Amazing Charts makes their money, and we continue to suffer.

My local pharmacy said 12/2 outage was for many providers not just AC.

It would be nice if we could get some feedback on where the recurring erx problems occur. Newcrop? Or surescripts clearinghouse? And how often failures are from which source.

What can be done to improve uptime for this critical system?

Is there a more reliable provider than newcrop and what would the cost be to have AC switch?

Larry
Solo IM
Cincinnati

It is now 10:30pm our time. The ERx that were in queue finally went through -- long after anguished calls from patients, and long after I reprinted the prescriptions to fax and sent them to pharmacies.

This is getting really old, and is beginning to look like EHR really is the crock my wife says it is. She does everything on paper and is home to cook dinner.

Here is another reason that I keep the free Allscripts. Not only can I do my rx when Newcrop is down, but if there is a problem with Surescripts network, they send an immediate Email when it starts and when it is resolved. Yesterday was a Surescripts issue.

And now for something completely different....

One erx failed to go through this AM. 5 were successful.

Gene

the dreaded red X, The connection was closed unexpectantly
well at least it happened early enough today to know it will be a fax only day

AGAIN???????
First 2 RX failed.

Message on AC support site:
Electronic Prescribing Status

NewCrop is currently investigating network issues. Some users may experience slow performance or lack of connectivity.
We are working with Sungard to provide an update with a timeline for restored service.
Thank you,
The NewCrop Team

Hello All,
As you have all feared electronic prescribing is down again. Newcrop is in the process of restarting all of their servers. They estimate that inside of 30 minutes transactions will start going through. We will keep you updated with any information as it is reported to us. Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this has caused you over the past 2 days.

Clayton@AC

Joel,

Where did you find this?

Thanks.

Gene

Who is NewCrop anyway?

Why can't we get a little more accountability?
I'm sure if it were just a money issue they would be right there with hands out -- they don't seem shy about getting the money up front.
Service is on the back end.

Been more like a 2 week problem not 2 days

Does anybody know how or if this will affect Stage 2 Meaningful Use for anybody currently in the reporting period?

It seems that all these scripts that are being printed or faxed will adversely affect the denominator for Core 4. If this continues into January this issue could start to hurt the bottom line directly - due to not meeting the requirements for MU - rather than the indirect losses we are currently experiencing in efficiency (a serious enough issue on its own)!

Do we any refund of the charges we pay annually to get eRx. this has been a persistent problem not just one time glitch. Accounting at AC - any ideas about refund??

Hello All,
Electronic Prescribing is back up. You should no longer be receiving any failed transaction responses.

Ravi,
Feel free to shoot me a PM and I can forward it to accounting or you can email Accounting@AmazingCharts.com directly.

Clayton@AC

It may be working, but it is VERY slow to transmit.

Gene

eRx's that I just sent (1:35 PM Eastern):

1/4 failed

WalMart seems to have a higher likelihood of failing.

Gene

2 phone calls last night from pharmacies that didn't get eRxs.
6 red "failure to transmit" messages on my AC this morning from random eRxs sent yesterday. (No failure messages on my computer last night at the end of the day, however).
Starting to think this may be SureScripts as Leslie mentioned. That would be bad since MU has basically made SureScripts "Zul the Gatekeeper".

I wonder if the Amazing Charts-NewCrop-Surescripts axis is considering this scenario: patient discharged from local hospital after MI with PTCA/stent on Plavix. The eRx fails but no notification to doctor (as over the recent holiday weekend). Patient told no Rx available, goes home to experience massive infarct from platelet rebound. Would that be a worse medical error than poor handwriting? What would your average jury think?

Perhaps these entities should look at some extra servers, etc., rather than replacing the tobacco companies as the next golden goose for the plaintiffs bar.

Hello all,
Yesterday evening Newcrop sent us the following in regards to the outages over the past few days.

Clayton@AC


NewCrop Partners:

The delays seen this morning are no longer being reported. An issue was revealed that only occurred when we had a large backlog of prescriptions to be transmitted. This issue may have caused performance issues in the past, but was exacerbated by the Surescripts downtime yesterday morning.

We rolled out a code change last night, and recycled the database. The recycling of the database has completed and resolved the lingering issues from yesterday.

The following additional steps have been taken to reduce the chance of this recurring:

* We have ordered a larger database server to support our growing customer base. We are reviewing additional short-term hardware options until the new server is in place.

* Queries have been reviewed, and many have been modified for higher efficiency.

* Batch processing of electronic prescriptions has been enhanced to reduce server load.

* Customers that were excessively polling our system have been notified and have been throttled to eliminate redundant traffic. Load will be further reduced once their individual corrections are in place.

We regret the inconvenience the delays and service interruptions have caused your customers and are actively working to prevent future incidents. These enhancements and additional monitoring should lead to improved performance.

Please contact technicalsupport@newcroprx.com if you have any questions about the above.

Thank you,

The NewCrop Team

Thanks Clayton.

Sure hope that the new server is online quickly, and has a smooth transition.

Gene

a quote from NewCrop website
NewCrop?s application and services are hosted by SunGard Availability Services. NewCrop leverages SunGard's fully managed secure cloud infrastructure built to meet the requirements of the most critical production applications. The SunGard Cloud is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform built on best-in-class Vblock architecture. Cloud services are delivered in premier data centers built to the ITIL v3 framework, audited under SSAE 16 Type II, and certified to the ISO 20000-1 standard.
Backed by SunGard?s 99.95% availability service level agreement (SLA), precision load balancing, and monitoring of our servers, being in the cloud allows NewCrop to ensure our users get the highest degree of application availability, security, and HIPAA compliance. In addition, NewCrop has multiple layers of data and service protections in place. NewCrop has fully managed backup procedures in place, as well as replication of our hosted environment to an alternate data center located in a separate geographic location from our primary hosting facility. In the event of any disaster at our primary hosting facility, our application services will still be available to users from our secondary data center to ensure no disruption of services.

Guess something isn't working right with Sungard either.

From NewCrop: " additional monitoring should lead to improved performance"

Should lead to improved performance???? How about "will lead to improved performance"?